The detection of duplicate payment items transmitted between entities is an important function of a payment system. For example, in a payment system, a payee who receives a physical check for payment of a debt from a maker may deposit the check into an account at his or her bank. This bank (the depositing bank) may digitize the physical check and transmit the check fields and related data and/or digital images of the physical check itself to the bank of the maker (the paying bank) according to a standard format for the transmission of checks. When electronic transmissions of check data, or imaged checks, are received at the paying bank, they are processed and verified before payment is made back to the depositing bank. Part of this process relates to the detection and removal of duplicate payment items. For example, if a mistake at the depositing bank, a computer network error, or the actions of a malicious party cause a single imaged check to be transmitted multiple times, it is important that the paying bank identify the duplicate payment items to prevent the maker's account from being debited multiple times.
Detecting duplicate imaged checks at the paying bank may be a costly and time-consuming process involving both automatic and manual components. For example, an automated process may be invoked to compare various data fields of the received imaged check to the corresponding data fields of previously received imaged checks that have been logged and archived in the system. However, even after this automated duplicate detection process, it might be difficult or impossible to determine whether some imaged checks are duplicates or originals. For these items, a manual review of the imaged checks may be required. For example, the paying bank may employ trained personnel to compare the scanned digital images of the physical check to the corresponding images from previously received checks.
The duplicate detection process becomes more costly when an imaged check closely resembles a previously received check, thus requiring additional duplicate detection processing and/or manual review. As an example, a check processed by a paying bank might fail to clear for one or more reasons, such as failure to verify the check data, or if the maker's account does not contain the required funds. When the check fails to clear, the paying bank may transmit a return record to the depositing bank to indicate that the check did not clear and provide a reason for return. Upon receiving the return record file, a depositing bank will often simply re-present the imaged check back to the paying bank after some period of time. This is done because checks that fail to clear on their first attempt will often successfully clear on a subsequent attempt the following day or several days later. These “re-clear” payment items transmitted by the depositing bank can cause special difficulty during the duplicate detection processes at the paying bank. Because re-clear payment items represent separate transactions between the depositing bank and the paying bank, they often need to be distinguished from true duplicate transmissions. However, re-clear items may have many of the same data field values as the original check item previously transmitted and archived. Thus, re-clear payment items may be mistaken for duplicate transmissions by the automated duplicate detection systems. Additionally, any scanned images of the physical check contained in the re-clear item may be similar (or even identical) to the images from the originally transmitted check. Therefore, even when using manual duplicate detection processing in conjunction with automated processing, transmission of re-clear payment items may result in costly duplicate detection processes and the potential for false positive determinations when identifying duplicates.